Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Wed Dec 15 23:36:39 UTC 2010

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 04:38:27PM -0600, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> I believe Comcast has made clear their position that they feel content 
> providers should be paying them for access to their customers. I've seen 
> them repeatedly state that they feel networks who send them too much 
> traffic are "abusing their network". 

That's rich, given the enormous quantity of spam sourced from Comcast's
network over the last decade.   (And yes, it's ongoing: 162 unique sources
in the last hour noted at one small observation point.)

Now I realize that SMTP abuse isn't exactly the most bandwidth-chewing
problem.  However, it's a surface indicator of underlying security issues,
which in this particular case can be summarized as "one heck of a lot
of zombies".  Given that those systems are known-hostile and under the
control of adversaries, it's certain that they're doing all kinds of
other things that chew up a lot more bandwidth than the spam does.

So maybe instead of engaging in brinkmanship with other network providers
or spending engineering time trying to monetize DNS queries, Comcast should
try solving this seven-year-old problem and *then* reassess whether
or not the pipes are fat enough.

---rsk